Commercial food service operations and restaurants throw away 5-20% of the edible food they purchase. Ingredients cost approximately ⅓ of revenue for the typical player. Avoidable waste therefore represents 2-7% of revenue. In a sector where net profits are less than 10%, this can make a material difference in profitability.
The first step to reducing food waste is measuring it. Existing solutions come in the form of highly manual processes used to track food waste, such as weighing bags of waste at end of day. They are generally hard to sustain for more than a quick audit, and can be expensive due to the auditor/consultant time required. They also tend to have less granular data on what is being thrown away, which makes them less impactful.
Other solutions have been developed which are more automated and granular than the manual processes described above.
One such solution is provided by Leanpath, Inc. and is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,415,375. In this solution, a food waste monitoring system is provided where users fill a container with a food waste and place the container on a weigh station. The weigh station records the total weight and requests detail about the food waste from the user. The container is then emptied into a waste receptacle and may be reused. The weight and data is stored and is used to analyse food waste.
The disadvantage with the solution described above is that is depends on users placing food waste into the containers, weighing the containers, and recording the type of food waste. This solution is quite onerous to implement for a busy food service operation or restaurant where the users are likely to be busy kitchen staff and, consequently, this solution suffers from low compliance. This leads, therefore, to missing data on some or most food waste and an erroneous analysis of the operation's food waste.
Accordingly, there is a desire for an improved waste monitoring system.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a food waste monitoring method and system which overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art, or at least provides a useful alternative.